On January 7, 2021, the "2020 FAT Value Era Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony" was successfully held in Beijing.
This "2020 FAT Value Era Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony" was initiated by Odaily and 36kr, co-hosted by Deepcoin, Conflux, and Findora, and BCA's exclusive art empowerment, LBank, Cocos-BCX, 58COIN, Jubi Labs, ForTube, Biying, BiKi , Farmland, Bifrost, Mars Cloud Mine, AAX strategic support.
This "2020 FAT Value Era Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony" was initiated by Odaily and 36kr, co-hosted by Deepcoin, Conflux, and Findora, and BCA's exclusive art empowerment, LBank, Cocos-BCX, 58COIN, Jubi Labs, ForTube, Biying, BiKi , Farmland, Bifrost, Mars Cloud Mine, AAX strategic support.
The following is the full text of SBF's speech (with certain deletions), compiled and organized by Odaily（Note: Due to the epidemic situation, SBF was unable to visit the site in person, but brought us this sharing by recording a video. The video was recorded in the past December, so some specific data may be different from the current market conditions. access).
Hello everyone, thank you for coming to the "2020 FAT Value Era Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony". I am very happy to participate in this event of Odaily. I am Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange.
FTX is a centralized exchange, and I'm very excited about the growth it has achieved over the years, but it's clear that the focus of the crypto industry in the last six months has not been centralized exchanges, because DeFi has developed rapidly and become people's favorite exchange. The topic that is often discussed has also become the driving force for the development of the industry.
Interestingly, the rise of DeFi is indeed different from the development of many other industries, although there are certainly some similarities. Importantly, people discovered the power of Yield Farming by accident in the first place. The beginning of the DeFi summer craze began with the launch of the Compound governance token COMP. One to two weeks before the launch, the OTC market expected the price of COMP to be $5-10. At the time, this expectation was reasonable, but COMP suddenly became popular. It was $100 at the beginning of its launch, and it rose to $400 in the first week. Suddenly, its value reached 30 times what people imagined. The airdrop released every day is no longer $30,000, but $1 million, which means there is value in locking up a lot of money in the Compound protocol, because you get a portion of that $1 million in COMP. A large number of users began to transfer all their capital, and the lock-up volume of Compound quickly exceeded 100 million US dollars, then 200 million, 300 million US dollars, and finally reached 1 billion US dollars, and suddenly, Compound became an agreement of great value. So when you think back to where Yield Farming actually originated, it came to its best in an almost unexpected way.
However, as people started to realize the huge potential of farming income, a large number of replica projects also started to appear, and many projects began to use this model to airdrop a large number of tokens to users. This has brought crazy benefits, users only need to deposit funds into a certain agreement to get an extremely impressive rate of return (APY), which indeed stimulates the rapid growth of DeFi projects, but with the growth comes the number of tokens In the end, the token prices of many projects fell again and again until they collapsed. On top of that, the protocol itself is not well developed in the process, and once the incentives kick in, the protocol tends to lose its halo and the market enters a cyclical pattern of quickly gaining traction and then disappearing .
In the context of the DeFi summer boom, there are signs that a larger ecosystem is growing, and the speed of product innovation has not caught up with the speed of rising prices. In this context, people have begun to explore the establishment of new forms of decentralized exchanges , to transfer assets from one protocol to another through various bridges. At this time, we launched our own project - Serum, a decentralized ecosystem based on Solana.
DeFi will bring huge value, but currently there are only about 10,000 real active users. In the future, the number of DeFi users will reach 1 million or even 1 billion. This is quite exciting, and it is also where the real value of DeFi lies. But the problem is that today's ecosystem can't support this level of user volume, we need to expand and find a blockchain that can carry higher traffic, and we need to build new applications to support massive users, so we started trying to design from scratch And thinking about what is the right blockchain and what is the right project, and finally established Serum, a high-speed blockchain project that is thousands of times faster than many other blockchains.
If you search on Twitter, the Serum website, or other media sites, you can read some big news that will be released in the Serum ecosystem in the next 6 months or so.
Although DeFi is still hot recently, some attention in the market has shifted to Bitcoin and exchanges. I think the DeFi summer boom is a huge win for FTX, aside from Serum, we are also very active in listing DeFi tokens, the market has changed a bit recently, and Bitcoin has caught our attention again .
I don't think anyone knows what the industry will look like in the future, just like most people don't predict what will happen this year, so I certainly don't know what will happen next year. But if I had to guess, I would say that one of the following two directions will eventually emerge. The first direction is that the scale of the industry will increase significantly, but the overall situation will not be much different from now. You're only going to see modest iterations within the ecosystem, the market is still mostly for the crypto players and not the world at large, I'd probably be sad if that happened, but the odds are the market will eventually go in that direction very high.
Another possibility is that commerce will start to be built on the blockchain, applications will start to scale to millions of users, exchanges will support billions to trillions of dollars in on-chain transaction volume, and eventually the world The top 10% of people will have the vision of "on the chain". The encrypted currency on the chain will also capture huge value in this process, and the blockchain technology will also release huge application potential, which is also the development direction I personally expect.
At the turn of the year, Bitcoin, which keeps setting new highs, has once again become the focus of the market. Perhaps Bitcoin will break through the $30,000 mark soon(Odaily note: SBF hadn’t passed the New Year’s Eve when the video was recorded. As of the publication, the price of BTC has exceeded $37,000).
As the price broke out, Bitcoin’s exchanges also reached new all-time highs. Why is this happening? There may not be an exact answer but what is for certain is that this is very different from the bull market in 2017 and when you look back at how the market consolidated that year you can see it was really retail driven as my colleague said today Yes, back then you would talk about Bitcoin with your friends when you were walking down the street, and you would casually ask "Do you know Bitcoin?"
The current situation is completely different. You can look at the number of registered exchanges. The number is high but not very large. Instead, what we're seeing is a few companies finally testing the waters, Microstrategy being the first, Paypal not far behind, and now, almost every week, a hedge fund announces that it has bought a large amount of Bitcoin. But it's not like everyone's getting involved in the market, it's not like Walmart is going to swap their securities for bitcoin, but we're starting to see some signs that things are going in that direction develop. This is what really drives the bull market. Grayscale's fund management scale has increased by more than 10 billion US dollars in 2020, and the purchasing power mainly comes from US institutional investors, which in turn drives huge trading volume.
An interesting thing to share, FTX’s trading volume in December 2020 may be more than the sum of all of 2019. This number is amazing. We have billions of dollars in trading volume every day. It approached $10 billion in just a few days. With the growth of FTX's transaction volume and user base, FTT is also constantly setting new historical highs (as of the publication, FTT is quoted at $9.6).
One thing we are very proud of is that FTX's matching engine has been solid, we haven't had a second of downtime in the past few months, even with such huge volumes. This is mainly due to the fact that we have invested a lot of time over the past 6 months revamping our technical base, and as our trading segments have grown and load requirements have rapidly increased, we have required technical upgrades to support FTX smoothly run. In terms of the number of orders we can take on, this year we have provided about 10 times more technical capacity.
Today, the FTX exchange has stood out from the crowd and is firmly in the ranks of the top exchanges - usually in the top five or so. What will we see in 2021? Who knows. But if I had to guess, I guess we'll see a continuation of the growth we've seen, FTX volumes will continue to grow, the product will be richer; we've been building prediction market contracts, users are also interested in We're very interested in predicting contracts for , and we'll be doing more of that; we also recently launched a stock trading service on FTX. We'll have some cool new stuff coming soon, expected in the next few months.
In general, there will be more intersections between traditional finance and crypto markets in the future. As traditional finance begins to dabble in cryptocurrencies, now is the time for cryptocurrencies to blossom around the world. On the one hand, FTX will support stock trading in the traditional financial market, and on the other hand, Coinbase seeks to be listed on the traditional financial market. In the future, Bitcoin may also be traded on traditional exchanges, and some traditional companies will also start to use cryptocurrencies for payment... ..blockchain will start to demonstrate to the masses that it offers powerful advantages.
In the future, the encrypted world will continue to develop, and no one knows whether it will fall into a trough again, and whether another cryptocurrency winter will come. But I hope to see continued growth in the future, seeing cryptocurrencies integrated into the financial world, and crypto starting to take its place in the world. Many people once believed that cryptocurrencies would be completely popular at the end of 2017. It turns out that they were right, but this scene was 3 years late.
I can't predict the future, but it's been a very exciting year for cryptocurrencies and a terrible one for the world as a whole. We are lucky to live in an Internet industry, and I am now full of anticipation for what may happen in 2021.
Many thanks to Odaily for the invitation. We have many public contact methods. You can contact us at any time through Twitter, website, email, telegram or WeChat. Welcome to experience FTX and tell us what you think. We sincerely hope that you can become a part of our ecosystem. User.
Thank you for listening.
